What Is the Acceptance Rate of McGill University?

McGill is one of Canada’s most prestigious universities and receives tens of thousands of applications every year from all over the world.

But what is the McGill university acceptance rate? In this guide we’ll look at the official admissions data from McGill to work this out, as well as looking at admissions for international applicants and how hard it is to get into McGill.

Acceptance rate vs admit rate

Before we discuss the McGill acceptance rate, we should first make an important distinction.

For the rest of this guide, we will use acceptance rate to refer to the percentage of students who apply to McGill who are offered a place.

Not all of those students then take up their place and enter their class at McGill. Most of these will go to another university, some might take a year out and re-apply to other universities, and some might not go to university at all. We will refer to the percentage of students who apply to McGill who are offered and take up their place as the admit rate. The admit rate is always necessarily lower than the acceptance rate.

Now we’ve cleared that up, let’s take a look at the admissions data for McGill.

Acceptance rate of McGill University

The table below shows McGill’s official acceptance rates and other admissions data for Fall 2024.

Type	Undergraduate/Professional	Continuing Education	Graduate
Applicants	37568	1188	14621
Offers	18063	868	5026
Entering class	7180	581	2765
Acceptance rate	48%	73%	34%
Admit rate	19%	49%	19%

As we can see, the acceptance rate of McGill University for undergraduate students is 48%. Around 18,000 of the 37,600 applicants to McGill are offered a place. Graduate programmes have slightly lower acceptance rates, at 34%. Remember that the acceptance rate is an average, taken across all programmes. Some degrees will be more competitive than this and others less so.

The undergraduate admit rate is significantly lower, at 19%, meaning most students who are offered a place by McGill do not end up entering their class – usually for one of the reasons we mentioned above.

McGill University acceptance rate for international students

McGill’s acceptance rate of 48% is for all students, both domestic and international. But what is McGill University’s acceptance rate for international students specifically?

Unfortunately, McGill doesn’t release this data. However, a quick look at its entry requirements for international students can give us an idea of how hard it is to win a place at McGill for applicants from outside Canada.

US

McGill is officially test-optional for many programmes. However, submitting your standardised test scores with your application is highly advisable.

For the ACT, McGill advises that a minimum score of 26 is needed to be competitive. For the SAT, the minimum score is 1250 (680 on Reading and Writing, 570 on Math).

Remember that these scores are just guides and may vary from year to year. They will also vary widely by the programme you apply for. Some will have much higher cut-offs than others – usually programmes in STEM require higher scores.

Nonetheless, these scores can give us a rough idea of how challenging it is to get into McGill for US students. These SAT and ACT minimums are comfortably below what would be required for an Ivy League school. However, they are still in the top 20% of test scores in the US, so you need to be a high-performing student to be considered.

UK

McGill publishes the cut-off grades for successful applicants in the previous year. This means that no one with grades lower than this was offered a place at McGill.

A Levels

For A Levels, there is significant variation between programmes. Most subjects had a cut-off between ABB and A*AA. This would place them between a relatively uncompetitive Russell Group course and a course at Oxbridge in terms of A Level requirements – that’s quite a variation.

However, at the top end, Architecture applicants required a minimum of four A*s to get into McGill last year. Given that only 0.7% of A Level candidates achieved four A*s, that’s incredibly competitive.

International Baccalaureate

Similarly, there is a large range of IB score cut-offs depending on the programme you’re applying for. The most common cut-off is between 36 and 38, but there were cut-offs of 30 at the bottom end and 42 at the top end (for Architecture, again).

How hard is it to get into McGill University?

You might look at McGill University’s acceptance rate of 48% and think that makes it fairly easy to get into. Especially when contrasted with Ivy League acceptance rates around 5%, or Oxford and Cambridge around 16%, McGill’s acceptance rate seems high.

The truth is a little more complicated, however. McGill’s relatively high acceptance rate is driven partly by a very different university application culture in Canada, particularly compared to the US. Put simply, given that McGill makes its entry requirements and cut-offs explicit, far fewer applicants with slim chances of acceptance apply in the first place than is the case for Ivy League schools. This artificially inflates the acceptance rate: if a relatively small number of qualified students apply, the acceptance rate will be comparatively high.

A quick comparison with Harvard will be instructive:

	McGill	Harvard	Difference
Applicants	37568	54008	-30%
Offers	18063	1970	817%
Entered class	7180	1647	336%
Yield rate	40%	84%	-52%

McGill’s much higher acceptance rate is driven by a few key factors:

1. McGill receives 30% fewer applications than Harvard but has more than four times as many places available. In other words, McGill is a bigger university but fewer candidates apply.
2. McGill’s yield rate – the percentage of offered students who then enrol – is half as high as Harvard’s. This might reflect Harvard’s greater prestige: the vast majority of students who are offered a place at Harvard want to take it up, whereas McGill may be a second choice for more students. What this means it that McGill has to make many more offers in order to fill its roughly 7,000 available spaces, whereas Harvard only needs to offer to a few more students than the 1650 places it has available.

None of this means that McGill is easy to get into. A candidate who doesn’t meet McGill’s entry requirements, which are especially high for Canadian students, will be rejected. In fact, the average high-school grades of incoming Canadian students at McGill is 91.7, the second highest in Canada.

It’s true that international entry requirements are lower, however. This is likely to be a result of the fact that international students pay higher tuition fees at McGill, and universities are still businesses which need to pay attention to the bottom line.

Overall, then, McGill is very hard to get into, especially for Canadian students. International applicants might find the process a little less competitive – particularly compared to Ivy League schools or Oxbridge – but it remains quite a selective university.

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